HERE WE ARE AGAIN. It seems like I write these New Year’s Eve retrospectives more and more frequently… the days slip by faster and faster!
2024 was, overall, a pretty good year for me. The one sad note was that we lost our cockatiel Stormy over the summer, who was truly the light of our house for the past decade. You can read about her here.
The highlight of the year was a family vacation over the summer to New York City – our first vacation since COVID. And this one was especially important to me, because I wanted to be the one to introduce my son Shaun to one of my favorite cities (I fell in love with the Big Apple when I was just a year older than him and lived there for a summer on a magazine internship when I was in college!) We saw three musicals (including Hamilton!), went to three jazz clubs and hit most of the major sites, from Battery Park to Central Park. You can see some pictures and video from that trip here.
Another highlight for me was that I met one of my favorite Italian directors, Sergio Martino. In January, he appeared for two nights at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago to introduce and do Q&A for two of his classic giallo films, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh and Torso.
A couple years ago, I found Sergio through Facebook and he agreed to look at my “giallo homage” novel … After reading it, he was kind enough to give me a wonderful promotional blurb for Five Deaths for Seven Songbirds. I never imagined at that point that I would ever get to meet him in person but there ya go. You just never know! You can read about my fanboy night here.
Book Tours and More…
This year, I celebrated 30 years as a published author and released two new books – Living Death Race (a Deathrace 2000/Zombie novella) and The Bloodstained Doll (a new giallo murder-mystery-thriller) – so I spent a lot of time on the “book tour” road over the summer and fall. My novel The Night Mother was also nominated for a Splatterpunk Award, so… it was a good year in books!
I also travelled to two weddings: my nephew Collin got married in Ohio in the summer and my friend Jerry Chandler’s daughter Noa (who’s like my niece!) got married in Detroit in the Fall.
Between the weddings, horror conventions, pinball shows, driving my son Shaun back and forth to college and a work trip, this year I visited 8 cities outside of Illinois:
- San Diego
- Cincinnati
- Indianapolis
- Milwaukee
- Detroit
- Kalamazoo
- Iowa City
- Cleveland (a suburb, anyway)
I was part of the Grand Opening week of the new Barnes & Noble in Oswego and did a bunch of other book events in Illinois. I got around in 2024.
I also finally caved in to “social pressure” and joined TikTok and BlueSky. I actually enjoyed playing with the video editing tools on TikTok a lot more than I thought I would, and started a “Books with a Bird” book review roundup of my book reads with my cockatoo Kiwi.
Doing those videos probably helped me to finish reading a couple extra books this year (here’s the most recent Books with a Bird if you’re curious). I actually read 15 books this year, more than I have in several years.
Books
My favorite book that I read this year was Scott Kenemore‘s Edge of the Wire, an awesome sci-fi/horror-in-space novel that reminded me of the best of classic SF with the menace of Alien. I highly recommend this one (my blurb for it ended up on the cover!)
Another standout was Michael Laimo‘s erotic thriller Missed Connection. Michael and I started out together 25 years ago on Delirium Books but it’s been a decade since he has published. His switch from horror to thriller worked great – this book was a huge return for him.
I also read a bunch of novels that have been sitting FOREVER on my TBR pile. I totally loved Carl Hiaasen‘s Razor Girl, Richard Laymon‘s Midnight’s Lair, Christa Faust‘s Choke Hold and Bryan Smith‘s Depraved.
I also had the pleasure this fall of publishing an awesome book on my own Dark Arts imprint in 2024. Brian Pinkerton‘s super fun trilogy of zombie novellas has been out-of-print for years, and so I reissued an omnibus edition collecting all three books as the How I Started The Apocalypse omnibus edition.
Read more about it on the Dark Arts Books site!
Movies
I am a huge film fan (which explains why two of my last three novels are homages to the Italian giallo films of the 70s). So every year I track the films I watch. In 2024, I saw around 95 films. Like most years, the majority of them were made before 1990 (70 of them!), because I’m kind of obsessed with 60s-80s cinema. I saw a couple dozen horrors, a couple dozen exploitation films, a dozen giallos and a handful of polischetti, sci-fi and drama films.
BUT, I also saw some modern films, and the ones that topped my list with 5-star ratings were three that I watched last January since they were up for Oscar Awards: Poor Things, The Holdovers and, yeah, I’ll admit it, Barbie! I also really loved the Dune sequel and Ghostbusters Frozen Kingdom.
My top 4-star views were Sergio Martino‘s American Rickshaw, Umberto Lenzi‘s Brothers Til We Die, a gorgeous Blu-Ray remaster of Michele Suavi’s Dellamorte Dellamore which I had seen on DVD years ago and didn’t appreciate as much then, and the David Bowie vehicle Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, a film I’ve waited 40 years to see – the soundtrack is one of my favorite soundtracks and all these years I somehow managed to never see the film.
Music
I was a music critic for 20 years for a Chicago area newspaper, so it’s a little disconcerting to be, admittedly, a little out-of-the-loop these days when it comes to new releases. Shaun has turned me on to some new acts, which I’ve enjoyed (seeing Beabadoobee at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom this fall was awesome and her 2024 album This is How Tomorrow Moves is great).
But while I do like some new acts, my favorite release of the year is a no-contest. The Cure, my favorite band ever, released their first album in 16 years on November 1, and Songs of a Lost World is awesome. It follows the same moody architecture as Bloodflowers, one of my favorite albums of theirs and I absolutely love it.
I saw a crazy amount of concerts this year, many of them on the “80s nostalgia trail” with Brian Pinkerton. Sadly, the last show I went to may have given me tinnitus forever; I stayed way too close to the stage for the Actors/Bellwether Syndicate show in November and thanks to Bellwether Syndicate in particular (they turned up WAY too loud) my ears have been ringing ever since 🙁 Word to the wise kids…. always bring earplugs. I’ve seen hundreds of concerts and should know better.
Anyway… here in no particular order is my 2024 Live Music Punch List:
- Green Day
- Smashing Pumpkins
- Actors
- Bellwether Syndicate
- Blue Oyster Cult
- The The
- Psychedelic Furs
- Jesus and Mary Chain
- Peter Hook & The Light
- Midge Ure
- Matthew Sweet
- Adam Ant
- Keane
- Thompson Twins
- Thomas Dolby
- Wang Chung
- The Motels
- Men Without Hats
- Naked Eyes
- Jacob collier
- Ladytron
- Haitus Kaiyote
Travel
I’m not going to go deep into the travelogue this year. I mentioned all the cities I visited above, and I did a lot of the same things I do every year — hung out at HorrorHound in March and September in Cincinnati, visited Pinball At The Zoo in Kalamazoo in the spring, and Pinball Expo in October, did two “SpookyFrog” book fairs near Milwaukee, Tomes of Terror downstate and more. All of them were enjoyable events where I got to talk to old friends and meet new ones. I feel very lucky to have been able to do all that I did.
But I started writing this at 10 p.m. on New Year’s Eve and it’s now 4 a.m. so I’ll end here and just say… Happy New Year!
Thanks to 2024… you gave me memories to treasure for a lifetime.
For 2025, I can only hope that life will continue to be as enjoyable as this year.
Cheers!